Dunno if a post has been posted on these forums before.... was just remembering a few weird pirate stations that popped up many years ago. One that was pretending to have live callers and bad impersonations of guests whilst playing NWA back to back with cliff Richard. Also remember hearing a broadcast that sounded like a dinner party complete with cutlery and plate noises!!!!
I've never forgotten these random broadcasts. Anyone else heard strange things?

Yes the movies used to be played on 105 from Norfolk Park.. Pulp fiction was played a lot too.. I remember listening to scr in 89 and there was pots and things clanging around in the background. Must've been in a all night cafe..
Pirateaddict!

I've been lucky enough to hear one or two here in Ireland. There's a station in Cork City which is in the south of the country on 97.6FM which usually plays country music, old Irish showbands and the like during weekday evenings and weekend afternoons. It's run by a lad with a speech difficulty who clearly loves what he does. It's been on air for about 15 years. And for a bit of variety, his mother also does a show on the station on Wednesday nights! Here's a recording from the station:https://www.dropbox.com/s/8iti7r4th5rnw ... 6.MP3?dl=1
Ireland also has a lot of church TX's, which relay the service to the local area. Often enough though, the church transmitter is left on even when there is no service, therefore anything that happens in the church is carried. I didn't pick this particular transmission up myself but in North Kildare just outside Dublin, a church transmitter was picked up in the afternoon with kids practising for their confirmation. The church transmitters get out fairly well usually.

There was a station in Yorkshire called Offence FM which basically was a lot of swearing and music which would have been censored elsewhere. Early 90's. Guessing but 100 MHz feels right. Wonder if this foul mouth thing was related.

Apart from that - Radio Tip Top was pretty weird at the time, 1993 in London on 105.6 apparently, but I'm sure I heard it around 97 something. Oh and Double O Soul is pretty weird if you ask me, and I think he's still on.

The Police back in the mid 80s around the middle of the FM band, it seems pretty unbelievable now how they used to use the FM broadcast band to receive their 'base' channels (I think it was around 98-102Mhz but I was only about 5 or 6 and can't really remember).
They moved it to VHF and UHF after that (in 1986 I think to VHF 155-156MHz and UHF 450-453MHz) which if you had a scanner you could listen in on.
....But about 15 years or so ago they started slowly moving them all off there over to the Tetra Network which you can't listen in on and they have all moved on to that now.

Taxis and PMR Radio on 87.5, when I lived in London I always used to hear taxi's on 87.5 and when a taxi was on my street (or in very close range)I could hear some of them come over any frequency I had it tuned to on the FM dial.

Aeroplanes, Dream FM 107.6 was forever getting wiped over by planes back in the 90s. I don't know if my radio I was using at the time was more susceptible to picking up RF 'images' of the planes transmitting (around 120/130MHz) on my FM band, but it was annoying.

Aeroplanes, Dream FM 107.6 was forever getting wiped over by planes back in the 90s. I don't know if my radio I was using at the time was more susceptible to picking up RF 'images' of the planes transmitting (around 120/130MHz) on my FM band, but it was annoying.

This used to happen when I would be listening to SPEC in Bristol sometimes. I lived about 30 mins walk from Filton airfield, and used to have to use a signal booster to get some stations. I think the combination of these things was probably causing it:

Other weird things I've heard have just been bugging devices (lots of clanging and stuff, turned out to be in somebody's garage a few streets away), somebody broadcasting the output from their cable box, and then picking up a mic and saying 'hello' (only heard that on air the once), and just about anything that EMI radio put out - https://www.thepiratearchive.net/emi/ - (it was an anarchisty/arty station, used to play recordings of political dinner conversations among other things. The recording on that page is from when it actually happened to be playing a tape of some decent tunes).

When tuning in the car I sometimes here people talking on the phone but only the person on the other end not the one in the car?

iTrip. These things are stronger these days, I heard a sat nav talking about going down roads that are quite a distance from me, all things considered, yesterday. There's somebody that consistently parks up outside the social club at the end of my road, every Thursday night, and leaves their iTrip on with no audio for a few hours. There's also somebody in a flat about 10 mins walk away from me, who uses one to route the audio for their TV to the radio. I can only just hear it on the SDR at home.

Aeroplanes, Dream FM 107.6 was forever getting wiped over by planes back in the 90s. I don't know if my radio I was using at the time was more susceptible to picking up RF 'images' of the planes transmitting (around 120/130MHz) on my FM band, but it was annoying.

maybe the 10.7 if, I used to hear aircraft particularly over a station on 106.5, I heard them once over radio 1, they used to complain about the pirates interfering with planes it was on a news report in the mid 90’s. no licenced stations would ever broadcast above 105 until the late 90’s in yorks. I remember the tweeting birds on classic fm back in 1992 when it came on air, that took 99.9 - 101.9 away for most pirates.

dream fm leeds used to broadcast radio 4 throught its relay transmitter, made you think you where picking up an image, guess it must of been some part of testing the signal, the weirdest thing I heard in the mid 90’s it would always happen whenever there was fog, I would get some really weird sounded french pmr near 87.5 with very weird sounding noises.

Back in the day a mate of mine would pick up a baby monitor on 99.7 from somewhere down his road. Once we heard a couple having sex in the background! You could tell it was in the next room but was a bit weird to hear!

Not that 'weird' but a memory from the 80s visiting London I remember around the top end 107-108 hearing The 'Sky Channel' - sung jingle was 'We're the Sky Channel and we're reaching out to you'. Not that strong a signal in SE2 and lowish mod compared to other stations......

In the late 80s in west London we were on "Videotron" cable which used what I can only describe as an extremely wide analogue multiplex of loads of channels, radio and TV. If you got an FM radio near the cable, you could demodulate various stations in the mux which were mapped onto that range of frequencies possibly including the audio subcarrier of Sky Channel. Their ident was definitely the one you describe. Wonder if it could have been that? Would explain why the audio was lower than broadcast FM stations too.

In the late 80s in west London we were on "Videotron" cable which used what I can only describe as an extremely wide analogue multiplex of loads of channels, radio and TV. If you got an FM radio near the cable, you could demodulate various stations in the mux which were mapped onto that range of frequencies possibly including the audio subcarrier of Sky Channel. Their ident was definitely the one you describe. Wonder if it could have been that? Would explain why the audio was lower than broadcast FM stations too.

In the late 80s in west London we were on "Videotron" cable which used what I can only describe as an extremely wide analogue multiplex of loads of channels, radio and TV. If you got an FM radio near the cable, you could demodulate various stations in the mux which were mapped onto that range of frequencies possibly including the audio subcarrier of Sky Channel. Their ident was definitely the one you describe. Wonder if it could have been that? Would explain why the audio was lower than broadcast FM stations too.

Interesting. Sounds like a probable explanation.

Similarly, in 1990 Bristol got cable via United Artists. My local area might've been the first area for it to be installed, as UA were in the business park which was built next to my school. In fact, the dishes were right at the end of the school field.

One service they offered, was to have a coax cable wired into your hi-fi radio, through which you could pick up the audio of selected TV channels (MTV etc), and also relays of the main stations on FM so that they could re-organise it all to save space. This meant, if somebody next door had cable, you could faintly pick up their radio channels.

I wish I'd taken a 50mw tx and a walkman down to the end of the school field, and set it up over GWR or something. The FM stations that were relayed, were simply picked up from normal FM and then piped into the cable boxes all over Bristol, so I could've easily overpowered one of the stations and broadcast to cable listeners all over the city.

One service they offered, was to have a coax cable wired into your hi-fi radio, through which you could pick up the audio of selected TV channels (MTV etc), and also relays of the main stations on FM so that they could re-organise it all to save space. This meant, if somebody next door had cable, you could faintly pick up their radio channels.

Exactly what happened with Videotron. You had to be pretty close to the cable with your radio to receive anything though - the signal levels were (understandably) too low to radiate much.

We had much the same thing in Sheffield from 94 onwards.. At my parents house in Darnall we had cable and i could connect the coax for all TV stations and radio stations and i could pick up mainline 105 from Norfolk Park! I had a flat up at Norfolk Park at the time and know mainline used to put their aerial out of the window fixed to the frame on a boom arm thing, right above the tram power lines.. Now these power lines ran all the way past the facility that received and broadcast signals down the cable network.. Maybe that is why i could receive mainline.. All i can remember is on the cable network mainline wasn't on 105 (like the fm signal) but somewhere else further down the dial..

Do you remember if the other FM stations on cable were all "offset" by the same distance from their positions on the FM band? If not... surely the cable company wouldn't deliberately include a pirate in their subscriber mux?